loving

God holds us. We are protected by His grip in such a precious way that the good and the bad must pass through His fingers to us. No harm, fear, or pain can reach us without His allowance, and yet, it is a loving grip. A loving allowance we cannot understand until time has frayed our pride and tempered our heartbreak. And even then, our only answer may be to trust His love more than our understanding.

We learn that all life is scarce yet abundant. Profane yet sacred. Loving yet hateful. Enlightened yet obscured. Isolated yet collective. That life is somehow derived from love.

I think it's very unhealthy to claim you love someone you don't know.

To be strong, and beautiful, and go round making music all the time. Yes, she could do that, and with a very earnest prayer Polly asked for the strength of an upright soul, the beauty of a tender heart, the power to make her life a sweet and stirring song, helpful while it lasted, remembered when it died.

Be loving and kind all the time.

In love, all kinds of love, we wait. If I can't be your dawn, I will be your sunset!

I've alway found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect.

I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it all messed up or not; whether you flush your own toilet or not. Your ministry is the way that you love people. And you love people when you write something that is encouraging to them, something challenging. You love people when you call your wife and say, 'I'm going to be late for dinner,' instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife sometime, because you know she's really tired. Loving people - being respectful toward them - is much more important than writing or doing music.

...[P]erhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return---that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.

I like to make you worry. It lets me know you care

She loved him, even though it was so hard to love anybody else after loving my dad. I think I knew this before she did.

Love spills out of these people. That's what I want. Settling for anything less is a lie.

I__ convinced we have each been endowed with a beautiful heart. We may not always see it. We may not even believe it. But it__ a gift that came with birth and, every time we act selflessly, it grows a little.

And thank you for saying all of that, and for loving me, for you haven't gone unloved, or unadmired, yourself.

Let us take our tongues and stick them out and waggle them in the wind. Let us walk, loving, let us walk and love, walking along, loving.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being __n love_ while discounting the importance of loving. (206)

I will never stop loving you, I know it__ a cliché but it__ damn true.